Seeking an Antidote for Apathy and Dogmatism:
A Novelist’s Plea for an Engaged Society

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), July 22, 2007, by author Daniel Spiro, a Trial Attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and the coordinator of the Washington, D.C., Spinoza Society.

Reading

I wanted to speak about religious labels. Take, for example, labels for God. I refer to the traditional God as the Cosmic Santa Claus. People who buy into the concept of God, I call Believers. Those who don’t, I call Atheists.

Religious labels are crude. And yet for most of us, once we blow them off, we blow off religion altogether. Labels give our beliefs their shape, their meaning. They also galvanize our passions.

Lest I sound too positive, there’s one religious label I can't stand – agnostic.” I understand why people use it. I just happen to hate it.

We need conversation starters. That's the whole point of religious labels -- to spur dialogue. I'd love to live in a society where, at parties, whenever things got boring, someone would bring up religion and all of a sudden the conversation would get lively. When I imagine who'd participate in those conversations, the last group I think about are the agnostics. You'll almost never hear an adult use that word as a conversation starter. It usually means 'I don't know and I don't care. There are no answers to those questions anyway, so why worry about them?' That's the attitude that alienates me. If a person doesn't care about what fascinates me most in life — worse yet, if he feels intellectually grounded in not caring — how can the two of us ever build a bridge?

If I wanted to be charitable about agnosticism, I wouldn’t think about adults, I'd think about agnostic teenagers. A lot of them aren't apathetic at all. They care a lot about whether God exists. They only want to make the point that we can't know the answer for sure.

That sounds harmless enough, doesn't it? Lord knows it's the truth. Obviously we can't answer the deepest religious questions with any degree of certainty.

If I had my druthers, we'd kill agnosticism with kindness. Next year on July 4^th, everybody would go to their county courthouse at High Noon and proclaim in unison,

'We can't know whether god exists with any reasonable degree of certainty. Some questions just can't be answered logically.'

There you have it. A truism. If we all say it once, perhaps none of us will have to say it again.

Forget the need for certainty! Certainty and religion don't go together. Whenever you see them combined, you see the face of close-mindedness, bigotry, fanaticism. But forget agnosticism too. It begs the questions that really matter. Do you live life as a believer in God? Do you love your God? Does your love for God inspire you in any way?

If the answer to those questions is 'no,' then darn it, say so! I'd respect your right to have that attitude. It's a whole lot more courageous than to call yourself an agnostic and then quickly change the subject back to the world of business or politics or the stinkin' weather.

Encrypted from a speech by a character in Daniel Spiro’s novel The Creed Room

Sermon

In the narrowest possible sense, the Creed Room is a fictional place -- a chamber in the second floor of an old Victorian in Garrett Park, Maryland, just outside of Washington D.C. There, a diverse group of people, who for the most part were strangers to one another, meet once a week from September 1999 through May 2000. They were brought together by a mysterious benefactor to discuss the questions of ultimate significance -- questions of philosophy, religion, politics, you name it. And they were tasked with creating a single new creed for humankind. Obviously, this Benefactor had ulterior motives for sponsoring the group, but the participants didn’t know those motives until after they finished their work. As we’re told early in the book, what they did was responsible for re-electing G.W. Bush as President in 2004.

So that’s what my own little Creed Room was, but in a broader sense, our whole society is a Creed Room. No, we’re not required to come together to enunciate a world view. But we do have to elect a President and a Congress. And we have to motivate our leaders to undertake massive legislative initiatives, to wage wars, or better still, to decide against waging wars. Each of us is responsible for playing an active role in this process. But how? What can we do to make our giant Creed Room function sanely? How can we find an antidote to the poisons of Official Washington: the polarization, hypocrisy, cowardice, pandering, all of it?

Before I suggest an antidote, let me point out exactly how much we need one. Consider the American public. Then take away all the people who are apathetic about the great questions of religion and politics. Next, take away all who live their life as if part of a magnet – they don’t have any great burning vision of reform in their minds, but they’re sure repelled by the half of the country they don’t agree with. How many people would we have left? Not many. And how under these circumstances are we going to get a society marked by apathy and polarization to take on any grand cause – whether it’s fighting poverty, global warming, or whatever? Something needs to be changed. And what I’d propose is the devotion to the dialogue.

What kind of dialogue am I talking about? I’d like to illustrate it by discussing what a Creed Room is like – and I mean a small Creed Room. I’m not suggesting that each of you has to start your own, though that would be great. But am I saying that if you want to be part of the solution, and not just lament our problems, you might want to consider adopting the mentality that makes a Creed Room tick.

In a Creed Room, everyone comes as an individual, not a representative of some group. You're not a boss, an employee, or an expert. You're just one peer among many. And you’re expected to think and feel independently of everyone else.

People generally come to the Creed Room with an open mind. Their job is to follow the truth wherever it leads.

People also come with a passionate heart. They viscerally care about the issues they're discussing.

Apathy, you see, has no more of a place in the room than does dogmatism.

There’s also no place in the room for the strawman. In the Creed Room, if you persist in looking at other people's perspectives in the stupidest possible terms and kick them around like a man made of straw, nobody's going to take your views seriously either. Instead, the presumption is that every perspective has value, and the job of the student of truth is to find those golden nuggets wherever they may appear.

John Stuart Mill once wrote that

“in all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.”

His point is all about the strawman. Most of us understand our own point of view, and dismiss the other viewpoints with some silly, strawman characterization – that way, we don’t have to consider that maybe the other guy has something valid to add. Sorry, but in the Creed Room, that attitude won’t cut it.

Many of the characters in the Creed Room also engage in a dialogue with some of the great philosophical minds of history. If I may paraphrase Karl Jaspers, philosophy is the “love of the search for wisdom, rather than the mere possession of knowledge.” And that search can’t take place in earnest without engaging in a dialogue with the great minds that preceded us, and the lesser minds like our own, which grapple with the same issues at the same time we do.

I’ve mentioned the fact that these people came to the Creed Room with a common mission — to identify a creed that folks on all sides of the political and religious spectrum can rally around, some coherent set of ideas that appeal to political liberals and conservatives, and to atheists as well as theists. Is it realistically possible to find such a creed? After thinking the issue through, I’d have to say: no, we’ll never reach a complete consensus on much of anything, nor should we try. But we can at least identify some fundamental principles with which nearly all thoughtful, open-minded people can agree. And armed with these principles, we can take on the scourges that plague our society and our planet.

In case you can't tell by now, The Creed Room is a hybrid. It's a book about ideas, and it's a novel. The characters fall in love, and they fight with each other, but they never lose their own unique voices.

Going through the exercise of writing the book helped me clarify my own voice, my own philosophy. I’d like to think I came up with something that is conducive to living a life that affirms the dialogue in all its forms. At the risk of being glib, I can summarize this philosophy in one sentence — “Let passion be your sail. Reason your keel. And empathy your rudder.”

Well, I don’t know anything about sailing. And I know a lot less than I’d like to about empathy or reason. But one thing I know plenty about is passion. It is certainly a dangerous thing. I guess we’ve all learned that from people like Hitler or Bin Ladin. And yet I continue to believe that if we want to get things done in this world – if we want to get off our butts and make a difference – we need to be passionate. The forces of inertia are so powerful that you need an equally powerful force to impel you to fight.

When I think about my heroes in life, they tend to be passionate political activists. They’re the types who are willing to picket Government offices, or wage long-shot political campaigns. But they don’t just tilt at windmills; they’re also obsessed with setting some realizable goals and working mightily to meet them. We all know people like that. Perhaps some of you are among them. If so, I salute you. If not, it’s never too late.

Your passions, your dreams, are what impel you to start dialogues — whether with yourself, your co-workers, your government, or whomever. But pure passion can indeed be dangerous unless it is inspired by wholesome content. And that’s where the other two prongs of my philosophy come into play.

I said that reason has to be our keel. To me, that means that we need to follow the voice of reason wherever she leads, whenever she leads. Sometimes, we don’t hear her. She doesn’t exactly yell into our ears. At most, reason whispers, and we have to think for ourselves about precisely what we heard. But when we do hear, it behooves us to listen and obey for so many reasons. One of the insane things about our world is that you have Fundamentalists of various stripes whose minds are closed and whose hearts are cocked sure about what’s true and what’s false. Because they’ve blown off logic as their guide, because they’ve let a few emotionally-charged principles govern everything they think, they have no basis for communicating outside their group, no basis for finding common ground. That’s a big reason for all this polarization. That’s a big reason for so many wars.

The path of reason I’m talking about involves committing to the search for universal truths, all the while recognizing our ultimate inability to definitively answer any great question with any degree of certainty. The path of reason I’m talking about requires never adopting one view when an alternative seems more logical, and more in line with our own common sense. And the path I’m talking about involves making decisions based on rationally-selected principles, not mere utility. We must, above all, be people of character, and character starts with traits like fairness and integrity.

That brings me to the third part of my philosophy, empathy. I called it the rudder because if I had to choose one characteristic that could steer people through life, that would be it.

When I think of a holy person, I think about an empathic one. Christians obviously point to Jesus as an exemplar of this characteristic. Jews point to such empaths as Hillel, the Baal Shem Tov, Buber, and Heschel. They all stood out for their warmth, respectfulness, and willingness to honor anyone or anything they encounter.

I love the way Buber puts it when he spoke about encountering other beings not as its but as Thous. To treat another empathically, in an I-Thou relationship, we don’t fundamentally think about how we can utilize him, and we don’t fundamentally dissect what he stands for into concepts. Rather, we encounter him with our entire spirit -- lovingly, spontaneously, openly, and yes, warmly. That warmth to me is the biggest key to any kind of fulfilling encounter, and that is the key to beginning any kind of fulfilling dialogue.

How then might we apply some of these principles to the concrete questions that arise in our life? I started this talk with a reading about the question of God’s existence, so I hope you don’t mind if I return to that very question.

This week at the Southeastern Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute, I was supposed to lead a two-afternoon workshop about the philosopher, Spinoza, and his heretical conception of God. The workshop turned into a three-afternoon affair, and when it ended, people were pleading with me to make a presentation about Spinoza to the UU General Assembly. The reason has to do with the needs of the UU denomination. One person after another said that there is a hunger in the denomination for a conception of God that holds up to the crucible of reason. Quite obviously, there is also a hunger for pivotal religious and historical figures with the UUs can claim as their own.

Spinoza was a 17^th century Jew who was such a heretic that he was excommunicated by the rabbinate of his native Amsterdam. He was an early advocate of democracy and the freedoms of religion, expression and thought, and he is considered by many to be the father of Biblical criticism and secular liberalism. Spinoza hung out with a group of educated, liberal Protestants, but he never joined any Christian church. I asked ministers at SUUSI if they could name a truer pioneer of modern UU principles before the denomination was founded. No one came to mind.

I, a practicing Jew but a friend of the UU movement, would proclaim that all UU adults and teenagers need to appreciate Spinoza as one of your greatest patriarchs. But just as importantly, you might want to enlist Spinoza in the great UU debate over the word “God.”

Spinoza was considered an atheist during his lifetime and for a while thereafter, but by the end of the 18^th century, Goethe called him “the most religious” man, and Novalis called him “God intoxicated.” Atheists claim Einstein as one of their own, but Einstein was no atheist. “I believe,” he said, “in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

Spinoza, you see, did what people do in the Creed Room — he considered what he took to be the best arguments for and against the traditional God, and he bought them all. He didn’t care for talk about miracles or Heavenly goals. But he did see an orderly, unified world, and recognized that this world can be looked at as a transcendent whole, not just as a bunch of beings that appear and then disappear, but of Being itself — eternal, infinite, unlimited, unbounded, ultimate. In short he saw Being, whether organic or inorganic, whether mind or body, as divine. Accordingly, he didn’t just see a little God in our world; he saw our world in God.

Spinoza lived at a time where nearly everyone was a religious traditionalist of some stripe. But he was unwilling to let the traditionalists monopolize our definitions for words, like “God,” that can be such powerful religious symbols. So he simply redefined what that word means. And, in so doing, he has brought God back into the lives of many of us who might otherwise have given up spirituality altogether.

If the UU denomination is looking for authentic conceptions of God that hold up in light of modern science and Biblical scholarship, Spinoza’s is definitely one of them. I won’t deny that there are others. But if for no other reason that that Spinoza’s God was conceived by a man who was, if not the Abraham of your movement, at least its Jacob or Joseph, UUs need to study this God and see for yourselves what all the fuss is about.

Before I give my concluding reading, let me point out one final thought that seemed to touch a number of people at SUUSI. In my second novel, which is almost completed, I evoke the thought of UUs being ideally suited to mediating between the warring parties in the Middle East. Quite simply, you are temperamentally and intellectually poised to play the role of neutral facilitators for peace. But that can only happen, I believe, if the UUs demonstrate an empathic connection with the ultimate concerns of Jews and Muslims. And that means joining them when they pray to the one, ultimate God, with all their hearts, all their souls, and all their might.

I want to conclude by reading a scene from The Creed Room. It’s a speech by the character Sam Kramer, and he’s explaining how Spinoza influenced him:

“The best way to explain it is to remind you of the night sky. Not the polluted D.C. sky. I’m talking the Wyoming sky. The one with lots and lots of stars.

“It’s awe inspiring to the eyes. And to the mind, it seems limitless. But astronomers can’t afford to simply wonder and gaze. If they want to get paid, they’d better analyze. So they focus on bits and pieces of the sky. Constellations, say. Like Orion.

“To the Spinozist, all the traditional western conceptions of God are like planets and stars in the same constellation. God the Father, call him Alpha Ori. Adonai, Beta Ori. Allah, Gamma Ori. They’re all great, and unique too. But relative to this big beautiful sky we could be contemplating, they’re just specks of light in a very limited part of space. When Spinozists think about God, though, we want to reflect on the entire sky, not just fall in love with one tiny constellation.

“Think of it this way. Theologians love to paint a conceptual picture of God. God is a He. He is all-loving, all-wise and all-powerful. He acts in accordance with a human-like will. He is separate from the world, which He alone created. He is incorporeal.

“This picture is known throughout the western world. Lot’s of people buy into it. Others say it’s crap, and say they don’t believe in God at all. To a Spinozist, that whole debate is ridiculously narrow. It relates only to one little constellation in the sky, and we have a right to see God in any part of the sky we want to.

“We don’t let other people define God for us, we define God for ourselves. And we start with the principle of the sky – its awesomeness, its limitlessness, its grandeur. That’s where we’ll find our God.”

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